The strength of primordial ties: Suburban community adaptation to school system retrenchment

Communities and local schools are attached to one another for many other reasons than the purely instrumental objectives of educating children. These highly symbolic interpenetrations of community and school include considerations of diffuse communal identity, religion, and ethnicity. Taken together with different priorities about wider educational goals, these narrower community objectives for local schools put contradictory strains on community-school relations in the heated climate of increased community participation in contracting school systems. Competing claims about the central purposes of local schools become extraordinarily salient parts of the external environment of school districts experiencing contraction, and play a major role in the process of adapting school district organizations to conditions of decline. For many citizens the desire to preserve the local symbolic and non-instrumental roles of neighborhood schools, in particular, may at times outweigh the goal of maintaining quality educational service delivery as seen from the perspective of school managers. For other citizens, the protection of quality programs, serving their children as stepping-stones to the wider society, outweighs considerations of local neighborhood solidarity and identity in adapting to declining enrollments and fiscal strains in the schools.An earlier version of this article was delivered at the 1984 Midwest Sociological Society Annual Meeting in Chicago. I am grateful to Virginia Bartot, Sally B. Kilgore, Gerald D. Suttles, and an anonymous reviewer for comments and suggestions.